Monday non-movie review

I didn't actually watch any movies this week. I know, right? Anyway, here's some reviews of some other stuff I've been doing.

Arthur and I have been re-watching Angel on DVD. His homework schedule has been light for the first time since entering high school, so I suspended my Netflix account for a month and we've been spending "family time" watching 1 or 2 episodes a night, and are currently up to episode 19 (of 22) of season 2.

I got on board late with Buffy and Angel, watching Buffy in reruns after it was all over, and starting Angel reruns from the pilot while season 4 was still in prime time. I fell in love with Angel right away, and really thought it was better than Buffy. On re-viewing, I can see why some people never got bit by the Angel bug. Season 1 is choppy and inconsistent. Some of the episodes are outstanding, but overall, the show struggles to find a voice. In episode 18, though, Faith is brought in. What works is that Faith epitomizes what becomes Angel's unique voice: The gray area of redemption.

While Buffy battles evil and works to draw a line in the sand, with her always on one side and evil always on the other, Angel is about the fluidity of the line and the place of individuals on either side of it. Angel is a vampire with a soul. Faith is a slayer gone evil. Both can be redeemed. Angel is about regret, remorse, atonement, and vengeance. That last is the tricky one, as season 2 progresses, Angel becomes more interested in fighting the enemy (Wolfram & Hart) than saving souls, and this is all it takes to push him dangerously close to switching sides.

Watching a television series is making me very conscious of the craft of writing. Seeing how a bit of dialogue is inserted for exposition; when it works, when it doesn't work. There are scenes that are stiff, there are people being told things they already know. Nonetheless, I stand by my contention that Angel is one of the best things ever televised.

Angel: After the Fall is a "season 6" continuation comic book. Despite Joss Whedon's hand in the plotting, I'm just about ready to give it up. The premise is that the culmination of the grand cliff-hanger battle that ended season 5 was the transporting of the entire city of LA into Hell. The hellish illustration is murky and hard to follow. Characters from time to time shine through, but there's too much going on. Hell is a busy place; it's hard to get a feel for what's important when there are SO MANY demons and so much muck and so much RED.

Duma Key is Stephen King's latest, and for regular reader of King's work, it is especially remarkable. I'm not a King fanatic, but I've read many of his books, and as far as I know, this is the first one written in a first person voice. It's a remarkable change for a writer of fifty or so books, and it brings a new sensibility to the pages.

Edgar Freemantle is simply nothing like a King character. He's something like King—being a middle-aged man recovering from a body-crushing injury—but his voice has never before appeared in a King book. He's wealthy, down to earth, direct, and confused. He speaks of his pain, his marriage, his daughters, and the growing mystery surrounding his time on Duma Key in an intimate and personal way. His new friend Wireman, his neighbor on Duma Key, is perhaps a more typical and stylized King character, but the friendship has a unique feeling.

Edgar, a construction company owner, was crushed by a crane. He has lost an arm, has a brain injury, and is rehabbing a crushed hip. He has rented a house on an isolated Florida Key to recover and paint. Once there, he gradually learns that there may be a supernatural reason that the prime real estate of Duma Key is relatively uninhabited, and that his own injury may have a supernatural component. Well, we expect this of King, but the horror is not the focus of the novel; the characters are.

The horror side of the plot bears a definite similarity to The Shining; the confluence of psychic people, a violent past, and an isolated location, but that part of the book is not nearly as important as the characters. This is a book about people.

I wrote an extensive review (seriously, 2000 words—what was I thinking?) of The Bond Code by Philip Gardiner at my James Bond site. The book is about the occult influences on Ian Fleming and James Bond. You might be interested.

(Hellish, yet angelic, cross-post)

Read Any Good Books Lately?

I'm a narrative person--I don't even do my considerable amount of daily cooking without listening to a book on tape, otherwise I wander off to the blogs to keep my attention from flagging. I'm not a musical person--that's why I can't contribute to the friday random ten things. So I'd like to introduce a book club feature and tell you what I'm reading (today).

(Hogan, are you out there? After your recommendation of Jo Walton's Trollopian Dragon book I think of you as my secret sharer.)

I want to recommend the book I just finished. Eiffelheim by some guy whose name I can't remember at the moment. The book is sci fi, I suppose, winding its way between 1340 and the present time its the story of a little town in Germany that disappears at the time of the black death, and a historian and his physicist girlfriend in the 20th century each exploring a different aspect of time. The Historian is curious as to why this village was never resettled, the physicist is working on a new model of space/time that would enable us to step from the "outside of the balloon sphere" to the inside and cross unimaginable distances and dimensions in a single step. But the meat of the book is an incredible event which the author makes utterly plausible--that grasshopper like aliens crash land near the village and become enmeshed in its politics and society through the good offices of the village priest who becomes convinced that the "outward seeming" of the body doesn't determine whether it has a soul or not, and who converts some of the aliens to Christianity, and himself to humanity. The details of medieval German society, agriculture, food, warfare, religion and science are perfectly limned. The discussions between the aliens, whose complex hive like culture and advanced science can't be translated easily into language that makes sense to the middle ages are set out conversationally and delicately. The aliens and the priest discuss Occam's philosophy (William of Occam makes an appearance in the book) and all the then current theories of natural philosophy as the aliens try to explain why they can't walk home, and the Priest tries to explain concepts like free will, reason, and salvation. The thing that moves you so powerfully in the book though is how naturalistically and realistically all this is portrayed. The Priest's personal struggles, the everyday life of the village, the little betrayals and sorrows and jokes, are all so real that even the end, the terrible entry of the plague and meaningless death is rendered meaningful. I started it yesterday and finished it today--so haven't had any time to blog. Anyone want to post what they've been reading?

Aimai

Madeline L'Engle

Madeline L'Engle has died at the age of 88.

A Wrinkle In Time was one of my go-to books as a kid, I read it over and over. Despite my notable memory problems, I remember large chunks of the book. I still find the explanation of a tesseract, as the ends of cloth meeting one another, incomparably useful.

Madeline L'Engle brought me wonderful characters, extraordinary ideas, and concepts of science and philosophy that didn't talk down to a young mind. To me, she will live forever.

(Cross-posted In Time)

Little Known Favorites

Evil Mommy (aka Karen M and Spyderkl) taged me with the 'little known favorites' meme: "List and describe three of your favorite books that other people might not be familiar with. Then tag five people."

Okay...this takes some thought...

The first one is easy: High Albania, by Mary Edith Durham. Durham was an Englishwoman suffering from depression who, on her doctor's advice, traveled to the Balkans and wound up devoting her life to the region. This book is the account of a 1910 trip through the highlands of Albania, an ethnographic travelogue of the most remote backwater in Europe. Durham has a sharp eye for detail, an engaging sense of humor, and (apparently) absolutely no fear.

This one is fairly obscure here, but very well known in Brazil: Rebellion in the Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha. This is a contemporaneous history of the Canudos campaign in the 1870s, in which the Brazilian army besieged and eventually (after several attempts) exterminated a millenarian religious community led by a messianic prophet. This story was the basis for Vargas Llosa's War of the End of the World; despite my general preference for fiction, I like da Cunha's version better.

Finally, one that isn't obscure exactly but isn't as well known as it should be: The Charwoman's Shadow, by Lord Dunsany. Dunsany sort of invented the fantasy genre, but more importantly he's a storyteller with an extraordinarily vivid imagination, a musical prose style, and a sly sense of humor. His short stories are probably his best work, but this is my favorite of his novels.

I'm not up to the challenge of figuring out whom to tag...so if you're reading this, consider yourself tagged. (If, that is, you want to be.) Post a link to yours in the comment thread, and I'll tag you retroactively.

2007 Reading List

We're lucky to have a tremendously erudite bunch of readers here at If I Ran the Zoo. A couple of weeks ago, I asked for advice on what to read (as a New Year's resolution); below is the list of recommendations:

John Barth, The Sotweed Factor
Chris Chester, Providence of a Sparrow
Robert Fisk, The Great Battle for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
William H. Gass, The Tunnel
Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire (maybe just the juicy bits)
Tom Holland, Persian Fire
Robert Massie, Dreadnought
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Joseph McElroy, Women and Men
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, Lolita, and Speak, Memory
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul
Richard Powers, The Goldbug Variations
Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (Nabokov's translation, at the same time as Pale Fire)
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992

Also One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Count of Monte Cristo, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Moby Dick, which I've read; and Against the Day, which I'm reading.

Everything on there looks immensely interesting, although (obviously) I won't have time to read all of them (unless I'm unemployed for most of the year, in which case I wouldn't be able to afford them). Nabokov in general, and Pale Fire in particular, got multiple recommendations, so after I finish Against the Day I'll start with that. I'll also try to read at least another couple of the books on the list over the course of 2007, but I haven't yet decided what (and probably won't until I get there). In the meantime, we have what amounts to a darn good list of recommendations for anyone who's looking for something interesting and thought-provoking to read.

Thanks again to all of you who made book recommendations; they are much appreciated. My 2007, at least, will be more enjoyable because of them.

[That's all, folks]

The Book Meme

Kvatch tagged me with this one:

The Rules -
* Find the nearest book
* Name the book
* The author
* Turn to page 123
* Go to the fifth sentence on the page
* Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
* Tag three more folks.

Okay, let's play:

The book is Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon.

"She was fully rigged up as an assault ship, sir."

"--cruising along innocent as any pleasure craft, till you assaulted her, with your infernal rays."

"She made a Furtive Movement."

Okay...that'll do.

I tag Marked Hoosier, Kathy, and Generik.

Update: Here are Kathy's, Generik's, and Marked Hoosier's.

[That's all, folks]

Bleg: What to Read in 2007?

I suck at New Year's resolutions. That is, I suck at making them. Sometimes I don't figure out what my resolution should be until halfway through the year. The only times I've successfully made New Year's resolutions on or around, y'know, New Year's, they've been about books. That's how I finally got through Remembrance of Things Past (after 3 or 4 earlier attempts) and Don Quixote (which I hadn't even tried).

So I'm looking for suggestions for a New Year's resolution book--something big and daunting, something I really should have read by now, something that's ultimately rewarding. Somebody or other suggested Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, so that's a contender, but I'm looking for other suggestions. (Obviously I'm not ruling out non-fiction, but I do believe in the inherent superiority of fiction.) So...anybody have any good ideas?

[That's all, folks]

All in Good Time

I recently finished All in Good Time by Jonathan Schwartz. I have been listening to Schwartz on the radio all my life (quite literally, as my parents listened before I was old enough to remember) so the memoir interested me, and it didn't disappoint.

This post, though, isn't primarily a book recommendation. Reading All in Good Time brought me up short on the whole concept of the memoir. The book is raw and open. Not in the conventional, might-as-well-be-true manner of James Frey, but in a much more personal, much more revealing manner.

In a memoir, anyone can be honest about their alcoholism (and Schwartz definitely is). To reveal your first drink at age ten, to chronical checking into the Betty Ford Center in a moment of desperation, these are facile revelations that function as the memoirist's stock in trade.

No, I'm talking about shame. Humiliation. Being a braggart and getting called on it. Hurting a friend with a casual lie and getting caught. Meeting your hero and sticking your foot all the way down your throat until you can kick yourself in the esophagus.

I was stunned by the honesty of these revelations, and moreover, by the absolute impossibility of me ever pulling off such a feat. I'm a very blunt person, the undisputed Queen of TMI. My role in life is to go there when people say "don't go there." But reading All in Good Time, I knew I could never be that honest in print, in public, with (as they say) God and everyone watching. Geez Pete, I've written five books, and even with the impersonal stuff of spells and elements, readers are happy, nay, gleeful, to rip you a new one. Tell them my mistakes? Oh the pain.

The. Real. Goddamn. Pain. I'll tell you the truth right now: I could never write like that without cleaning up my act. Without tidying the messes, without making me look just a little bit better than I really was. I wouldn't know how to bear the suffering of it otherwise, and I don't know how anyone else does.

(Cross-posted at Property of a Lady.)

[That's all, folks]

Obligatory Narnia Post

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe made a shitload of money over the weekend. I have no opinion about that¹.

Like everyone except Roger Ailes, I do have an opinion about the novels: great stories; too bad about all that Christian stuff in there.

This is not an uncommon opinion, and (perhaps predictably) in comment thread after comment thread the Lewis partisans misinterpret it as an attack on Christianity. It isn't. I don't object to the content of the allegory Lewis squeezes into his story (as opposed to the casual racism in a couple of the Narnia novels, content I do find objectionable) but to the existence of the allegory and the squeezing. The problem is simply that it gets in the way of the story.

(And by the way, if I had a nickel for every time I read somebody saying they never noticed the Christian allegory, I could buy lunch. I have one thing to say to all of you: I don't believe you. It's just way too obvious for even a small child not to notice.)

Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, sums up the problem nicely:

...throughout his own imaginative writing, Lewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the allegorical—his conscience as a writer lets him see that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it’s supposed to say....The trouble was that though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies.

Anthony Lane puts it a little more bluntly:

As every parent knows, there is a large Christian allegory sitting bang in the middle of Lewis’s tale, roughly as hard to spot as a rhino in a phone booth. Whether the film indulges or dishonors it, however, is beside the point; the problem with any allegorical plan, Christian or otherwise, is not its ideological content but the blockish threat that it poses to the flow of a story.

Exactly.

I believe in stories. I believe that a writer's highest loyalty has to be to the story. Reading the Narnia novels, what offends me is not the Christianity of the allegory, but the fact (incomprehensible to me) that at key points the author chose loyalty to some deity over loyalty to the story.

¹I suppose I have an opinion, of sorts, about the marketing, which is that you could make a serious drinking game out of it if you take a shot for every time the 'making of' featurette mentions Tolkien (or, more broadly, anything related to LOTR). Just don't try driving afterwards.

Update: A post by djw at Lawyers, Guns & Money reminds me of something else that always bothered me: the Susan problem.